Verse 1

¹You do not know, and yet you speak the speech of those who know; so you are not the best of those who know deeply. The wise do not reckon this common dealing together with the weighing of what is real. ²Just so, king, among the words of the Veda, spread wide in the learning of the great household rites and all that opens out of them, the talk of what is real does not for the most part shine out, pure and good. ³Not even the finest words spoken face to face are enough for a man to take hold of what is real, if the happiness of a householder has not of itself, by its very name, been made out by him to be a thing to drop, like happiness in a dream.

⁴As long as a man's mind is held by passion, or by clarity, or by darkness, it spreads itself out unchecked through thoughts and urges into what is good and into the other thing. ⁵That mind is made of leanings and stained by things of sense, a running of the strands, altered, sixteenfold; bearing under separate names a difference of shapes, it spreads out an inside and an outside through the cities of the body.